Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday February 12, 2010 @03:36PM
from the two-pound-hammer-and-ten-penny-nail dept.

wisebabo writes "Nathan Myhrvol demonstrated at TED a laser, built from parts scrounged from eBay, capable of shooting down not one but 50 to 100 mosquitos a second. The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.' Currently, for the sake of efficiency, it leaves the males alone because only females are bloodsuckers. Best of all the system could cost as little as $50. Maybe that's too expensive for use in preventing malaria in Africa but I'd buy one in a second!" We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the company has added a bit more polish, and burning mosquito footage to their marketing.

First: What's more impressive than the lasers that fry* the mosquitoes is the targeting and detection system that drives this crazy thing. Many people are looking at this and wondering how you pick out your targets. The system first scans the surrounding space and *listens*. What it is listening for is quite interesting. See, Malaria is an interesting disease because only specific mosquitoes carry it, and only the females. Since there could be many side effects to zapping any insects within range, or even any mosquitoes (regardless of species or gender), the laser targeting system listens for the precise wingbeat frequency of the female [wikipedia.org] Anopheles Stephensi mosquito and then zaps only those.

*Technically speaking, the mosquitoes will not be fried in the final product. In addition to potential danger to other occupants of this system's effective bubble, it is planned for deployment to very poor areas of the world where electricity will likely be at a premium. As a result, they are also experimenting with the minimum amount of energy a laser strike must possess to render the mosquito infertile, because that interrupts the cycle necessary for Malaria transmission between humans.

Sell a model I can buy that kills all female mosquitoes within range. I'll install one on the side of my house tomorrow. The Mosquito Magnet is only marginally effective and those run $250 these days. If this can really be done for $50, sell it for $100 and use the money to lower the cost in malaria areas.

Ah, that's a good point, but the counterpoint is that the spayed female mosquito is going to keep attracting males and may keep those males busy enough that, given the short reproductive lifetimes, they miss the chance at fertilizing the eggs of a fertile female. If you sterilize 90% of the females, that may cause the same effect as if you killed 98% of them (similar to a vaccination herd effect). So, not so good to protect you locally but better in the long run. If you have to place the devices where humans can't be because they could accidentally cause blindness, then they're not very useful for direct protection but more useful for limiting reproduction.

That said, I think somebody else put their finger on how it will fail - selection pressure will change the common beat frequency for the female anopheles mosquito. It's probably related to size, and this will therefore select for a different size of female by letting them survive. Hopefully a production version of this thing can take a firmware upgrade that changes the targeted frequency range.

Here in the interior of Alaska we have to plant trees close together in our campgrounds. That keeps the mosquitos with the larger wingspans from getting through. Heck, some of them have their own landing strip at the airport. Our mosquitoes are big -- scary big.

I'm from Minnesota, if this thing works that well I'll be tempted to pick it up and put it on a plinth in my backyard. Between that and my mosquito deleto I just might be able to enjoy a mosquito free evenening....

I've tried several variants of that, most recently the "Mosquito Magnet", and while they work pretty well, they are also pretty expensive to run (refill the tank every 3 weeks, attractants add up, and they pull a decent amount of power) and you're damned lucky if you get two seasons out of them.

Dude.. You give your neighbors the bug zapper.. Every time they smile cause they zapped a mosquito, you'll smile cause that mosquito was attracted to their yard and not yours. You get yourself the laser to pick off the stubborn ones..

It would certainly be an excellent dalek mimic, though. I would totally love to hear my roomba chanting "Exterminate! Exterminate!" while it wheels around my porch zapping mosquitos. (Or, I would if I had a porch, roomba, mosquitos, and a mosquito-killin' laser.)

Then they'll target both genders equally. Then the mosquitos will get a little tougher, perhaps reflective in the appropriate frequency, and learn to play dead and fall to the ground when hit with a laser that doesn't quite kill them.

Then they'll target both genders equally. Then the mosquitos will get a little tougher, perhaps reflective in the appropriate frequency, and learn to play dead and fall to the ground when hit with a laser that doesn't quite kill them.

Where they are promptly eaten by a frog. Sometimes, change and predation happens so fast that evolution is not a fast enough process to prevent extinction. Sometimes the change is insurmountable.

The sarcasm between the lines here is of course that some species by being cute are somehow magically important and we should intercede at great cost and labor to do whatever we can to prevent their extinction, regardless of the accepted fact that 99% of all once extant species are now extinct. Humanity is so conceited about how it subjectively assigns meaning to niche species that it thinks that a healthy biosphere is one frozen in time where nothing changes, nothing adapts. Never mind that without mass extinctions in prehistory, there would be no animal life as we know it whatsoever.

Nevermind the fact that the ecosystems which we *rely on to survive* involve many species, in symbiotic relationships... You can call them cuddly or ugly or whatever, but you can NOT call them meaningless. Your existential rant was beautiful up until the part where you were a completely arrogant ass.

The "great cost and labor" actually goes INTO their extinction as we destroy natural habitats in search of food, oil, gold, etc.

Uh, whadayya mean, if - we are in the middle of a mass extinction. Whether it includes us or not has not yet been determined. Get back to me in a coupla hundred years (an insanely short timespan for this kind of event, but that's the way it's going).

Most likely the evolution will be a breed of them that don't fly near people. Net win for us.

I hope so. It also made me wonder about Poison Ivy. That plant is damned lucky that it is hardy, because I can't think of a worse thing to happen (evolutionarily speaking) than to develop a defense which is exceptionally annoying to a sentient creature with access to landscaping equipment.

I'm sure it worked great as a defense for creatures whose only real option was to 'Avoid that greasy trefoil', but once you add a machete and herbicides into the mix it's amazing how fast a true advantage is turned into a significant disadvantage. I hate that plant so much that I'll cut it off at the roots if I'm just walking through the forest and happen to see it.

Odd considering that other plants (and domesticated animals ancestors) won the genetic lottery simply by having a useful feature which humanity exploited.

Poison ivy covers such massive areas that I don't think humans, short of a scorched earth campaign, could do much about it. In that case though, I think the collateral damage would far outweigh any benefit.

I think this would be a sudden enough change that evolution wouldn't have time to have any effect. It'd be a pretty radical change over a short period. Unless there are currently large male mosquitoes whose wings beat at lower frequencies, there won't be many mosquito Casanovas for the skeeterettes to find. And since they use wingbeat frequency to find each other, the females will think it's another female anyway.

Female mosquitoes that can sense the lasers at range and randomly avoid them come to dominate the species.Unless you have 100% coverage, there will be survivors (for some reason).Insects and Bacteria respond really really quickly to selection pressures.

It is certainly possible to detect the reflection of the laser off a nearby object, like say, another mosquito.

That's the way the lidar detector in my car works - if the cops illuminates a car in front of me, I've got a chance of detecting a reflection and slowing down down before he points his laser at my car.

Practically speaking, the evolutionary route would likely be that their wing beat frequency would change - faster or slower enough to not attract the attention of the laser (since that's what the poster above indicates is used for targeting).

Indeed. That little Italian chef gets charged for killing and eating a rat in the jungle, but apparently it's OK to shoot down mosquitos with directed energy weapons. Yeah it's all very "cool" and "useful" to kill mosquitos, but rats aren't fair game any more? Perhaps everyone has forgotten a little thing called the Black Death. Rats weren't so cool back then....

You know what's great at combating malaria? DDT. Does anyone know of any negative side effects of indoor use of DDT, to the inhabitants or the environment? Does anyone know of a more effective way to prevent malaria?

Indoor use? How about this downside: Most of the places ravaged by malaria have little to no "inside" with which to confine the DDT?

Yes, we know you are making a statement that using DDT to kill mosquitoes and prevent disease is worth the cost of killing wildlife through disruption of the food chain and reproduction cycles of avians. Good for you.

This lazer device use was banging around in the early 1980's. A couple of grad students from Florida created it. I don't recall how they were able to track the bugs. But they also "tuned" the lazer so that it lasted just long enough to only vaporize the wings. There's just one problem with this device, if the target is between the lazer, and a person's eye.

True, but skeeters are usually active at dusk and after. Two possibilities.

1. If it can recognize shapes, have it shut down whenever a larger animal is within 10-15 degrees of the beam. I mean, this thing is already accurately identifying specific species of mosquito, right? How hard would it be to put a "don't fire if something bigger than a housefly is emitting heat in the range of fire" system in?

2. Put it on a timer or switch, and only turn it on when everyone is inside, and put it away from windows (this would only work, of course, if you live like me - in the woods with no neighbors).

Better living through non-chemistry. I'll bet this can be adapted to target clothes moths and case-making moths [colostate.edu], the two species responsible for textile (and other) damage. The things are pernicious; very difficult to remove from a home with an infestation. Perhaps even make the zapper more effective by using it to cover the area where a pheremone trap is located (to draw adults into the kill zone).

This came out of Intellectual Ventures, which Slashdot often derides as a patent troll [slashdot.org] that brainstorms ideas, patents them, then lives off of the licensing revenue without actually contributing real products to the world or even prototyping their vaguely defined ideas.

This shows that IV is quite capable of producing actual, useful products. Its business model is not limited to patent licensing revenue, which makes it more like, say, IBM, than a typical patent holding company.

Maybe, just maybe, IV is not the evil parasite that many on Slashdot made it out to be. In fact, it seems to be in the business of shooting evil parasites with lasers, which is pretty cool.

You'd take a pan and tilt servo controlled laser, and put sound sensors around the laser. Move the laser towards the loudest noise, fire when the noise is equal on the sensors. Bingo, dead mosquito. Just like a sun tracker!

Everything else is software, like knowing what frequency to listen to mosquitos on.

Does anyone know:1. How much laser power do you need to kill a mosquito?2. What frequency noise do you target?3. Is it shark-mountable?

An improvement in both safety and efficiency would be to use two lasers, each about 60% as strong as the currently used single one.

The targeting computer would aim both lasers at the target frying it even faster than now. But, should one of the "canons" miss, or should an unintended target come into one of the beams, the "collateral damage" will be much smaller, because the other laser will not be aimed at the same spot.

I think, the military lasers should use the similar technique — use multiple weak lasers frying the same target from dispersed locations. An unintended object (such as a civilian airplane) flying into any one of the beams will be safe, and taking out the entire installation will be much harder for the enemy. The set can have a cumulative power twice (or more) than is required to destroy one target, while each individual beam is still (relatively) harmless.

When "healthy", such a setup will be able to destroy multiple targets at a time, and the enemy will only be able to reduce its capacity gradually, rather than all at once.

So why in the hell are we not nuking them all? why leave the males? So they can go find females that havent yet penetrated the perimeter and reproduce?

I say nuke them all from orbit. And biting black flies too.. The island where I vacation every year in Candada is rife with the buggers. you can see dozens of swarms of skeeters the size of a small house (the swarm not the skeeters) hovering near the tops of the treelined fields at dusk, and the flies along the beach in some areas make it impossible to inhabit without a beekeepers suit (they bite through tshirts). One year I had to run a 1/4 mile off the beach because I was being swarmed by the flies. I could feel them bouncing off the back of my head as I ran... not fun times.

Unless the detector is sitting right in line with the laser (or mirror), in which case it would get fried, there is going to be a difference between the angle that the detector determines the target is at and the angle required to shoot at the target from a slightly different starting point. And to determine that angle you need to know how far away it is.

Mosquito's are really tiny... i'm actually amazed they can hit them at all!

It'd be nice if they could determine the distance and somehow manipulate the cycles of the laser to only burn at that specific distance

Two slightly lower powered lasers might be able to do this, powered such that two of them need to hit the target to impart enough energy to fry it. Spaced slightly apart on the device they could intersect at the precise point of the mosquito, creating a much smaller 'kill' area instead of a long beam. We're talking about a much more complicated device though.

(such as my balls)

Assuming they are in your pants, they are probably quite safe. It's your eyeballs you should be really worried about.

Travel time is instantaneous for all practical purposes. If you think you need the distance to know what to shoot and what not to shoot, that's only half the problem. The real problem is what about the parts of the laser beam that aren't intercepted by the mosquito? I realize lasers do gradually expand, but not enough to avoid zapping the people nearby.

I'd be shocked if this laser is more powerful than 100 milliwatts (and it's probably much less), since even on the mosquito it doesn't appear to cause any damage to the main body, just the delicate flesh on the wings (according to the video). I wouldn't stare into it for long periods of time, but on your skin (and on brief exposure to the retinas), you'd be fine.

Ha, you young Whippersnapper! Back when I was a boy, we used to track 'em in 11 dimensions. 11! And 8 of those dimensions were *dang* small. And if we missed a dimension, our pappy would throw us through a hole in it so we'd have to squeeze back into the outhouse in the 5th dimension. You kids have it sooo EASY!

First, mosquitoes are only one thing at their level of the food chain. Flies, noseeums, and plenty of other non-biting insects live at the same level.

Second, this is actually better than most current solutions. Mosquito magnets and skeeter deleters and other things attract all manner of insects, not just mosquitoes. Don't get me started on spray permethrin and other insecticides.

Third, mosquito populations are WAY up in my area because bats are being wiped out by that nose fungus infection. I haven't seen a bat in my area in a couple of years, unfortunately, and they used to be common.

Fourth, these units would only work in the immediate vicinity of houses. In my area, that means there's still a few hundred acres behind my house that remain prime mosquito real estate. I only want my yard, they can have the marsh.

God damnit this is/. how dare you come in here and try and spread your silly idea's about mosquitoes being important blah blah blah. What the hell man? THIS IS A GOD DAMN LASER WEAPON FOR KILLING BUGS! You don't get this? pewpewpew? no? FUCK! {throws chair}